MOB G.A.E.: MOBility as a source of personal and professional Growth, Autonomy and Employability

MOB G.A.E. Consortium, Mobility as a source of personal and professional growth, autonomy and employability. Research report, 2015

All members of partner organisations involved in the research presented in this report had experiences of living, to study, work or learn, in a different country and were convinced that such mobility experiences can be an important source for personal and professional growth, autonomy and employability. They also realised that this conviction remains personal and subjective unless it is backed by scientifically valid evidence and widely disseminated.

Young people's mobility has been considered, in recent years, a key action supporting the full development of the potential of Europe’s human talent and social capital and contributing to tackling socio-economic challenges and fighting rising levels of unemployment. The Erasmus Impact Study (2014), that measured for the first time the impact of Erasmus programme (2007-2014) on employability skills, demonstrates that young people who study or attend a training abroad enhance their employability and their career development skills:
1. the risk of facing long-term unemployment is reduced to half;
2. one in three trainees are offered a position in their host company abroad after the traineeship;
3. they develop an entrepreneurial attitude and most of them continue to live and work in an international environment.

With funding from the Joyce Foundation, the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research conducted a national survey of 1,025 parents or guardians of children who completed a grade between kindergarten and 12th during the 2012-2013 school year. The key findings from the study, summarized below, provide much-needed information for policymakers and school officials across the country to better understand the perspectives and opinions of one of their key constituencies—parents.

Parental Involvement as a Key-Determinant for Equal Educational Chances: Evidence from Seven South Eastern European Countries

Autori: Claudiu IVAN, Aliona CRISTEI

This research highlights the determinants of parental involvement, and the role of parental involvement in generating educational outcomes for children across seven countries from South East Europe Bosnia-Herzegovina, Moldavia and Romania. A unique dataset, collected as a part of the 2009 Cross-National Survey of Parents in South East European (SEE) countries, was used (N = 7,776 parents). We applied Epstein’s theory regarding parental involvement and used logistic regression for the statistical tests. The results indicated that parental expectations regarding a child’s future education are highly relevant for expected school attainment; at the same time, parental involvement in the form of participation in class meetings or the perceived obligation to offer support to children doing homework had no significance for variations in child achievement. We discuss the potential reasons for the differences between the effects of the two dimensions of parental involvement on pupil’s attainment in school. Our results suggest that policies which seek equal opportunities in education should focus more on parental expectations as a crucial determinant of school performance. In other words, such policies should offset the effects of variations in parental expectations. Other outstanding results are that Montenegro and Albania are exceptions from the aforementioned findings and the correlation between parents’ expectations and children’s attainment in school is strongest in Romania, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. These results are worth further research.